It toughened me--a youngish literary pirate afloat on a yellow sea of political correctness--and gave me some vague notion of what lay ahead, though if I had known what actually awaited me, I might have quit, gone into something easier, safer, more profitable, less maddening, say philosophy, or construction.

In the 1890s, just before the international copyright became American statute, two infamous literary pirates (or "bookaneers"), Davenport (accompanied by his sidekick Fergins) and his adversary Belial (posing as a missionary), set out separately for the frail Stevenson's final place of residence in Samoa to pilfer the manuscript and sell it to a New York publisher before the copyright law goes into effect.

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